I wouldn't

from #28

That beautiful twist at the end:


I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It's not a good position I am in.
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

without pleasure

Henry has lost the ability to feel pleasure or happiness. Even when given all he's ever wanted, he cannot raise a smile, or even care.


that witchy ball
wanted, fought toward, dreamed of, all a green living
drops limply into one's hands
without pleasure or interest

Henry is bored / Anhedonia

From Drean Song 14

Life, friends, is boring.
...
I conclude now I have no
Inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
...
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

Phosphorescent: A New Anhedonia

"All of the pleasures now avoiding me.

All the music now boring to me."

Doors

“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.” 

- W. Blake (or maybe Jim Morrison, or maybe Aldous Huxley)


Blake believed that human beings were severely bound in their experience of the true universe by the limitations inherent in their human senses. Due to his own experiences with visions and prophesies he believed he possessed a kind of super-human perceptive capability that allowed him to see deep truths. His "doors of perception" were thrown wide while we were perceiving the world through "narrow chinks" in our own personal "caverns."

Blake's phrase "doors of perception" would, much later, be embraced by Aldous Huxley and other users of psychedelic drugs who claimed they were throwing wide their own doors.


“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

- W. Blake (definitely)

Stranger Than Fiction

The unbelievable power of nuclear devices is what really captivates McPhee and Taylor. It is magnitudes higher than what most people think of when they think of explosions.

An example:

"He said that Carson Mark had once pointed out to him a number, a fact, that brought with it the most astonishing realization he had ever experienced in physics. It had to do with binding energy, and it was that when Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki the amount of matter that changed into energy and destroyed the city was one gram -- a third the weight of a penny."

Griping

"Randall Jarrell once wrote that even in the Golden Age people were always griping about how everything looked yellow; all our hopes elude us."

- from Loitering

Doubt and the Unknown

We are just starting out, but it's clear from the first few essays in Loitering that the book is fiercely sad, mercilessly - surgically - self-conscious, and  beautifully written. D'Ambrosio's writing is a weird mix of world-weary wisdom, clear-eyed observation, and basically just writing about a bunch of things that he doesn't know much about. And he admits as much right up front. He says he doesn't do research. He just writes from a place of doubt and uncertainty. He says he doesn't even Google because he "wouldn't want to gunk up the works with irritable facts and information..." But it's forceful stuff. As he says, these are essays, not articles.

"My uselessness appalls me."

Green as beginning, let the garden diving / Soar.

D.T. in one word:  Delirious?

Thomas on Thomas

Thomas describes his technique in a letter: “I make one image—though ‘make’ is not the right word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess—let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict.”

I see you.

"If we accept that we can see that hill over there, we propose that from that hill we can be seen."

Great Last Sentence

Despite all my complaining about Speedboat, the last sentence is really good:

"It could be that sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime."

It's the kind of sentence you write on a scrap of paper and say to yourself "This'll be the last sentence of a book someday."

It is better to destroy than to create what is meaningless

Williams opens the last section of Book III of Paterson with the following passage -

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds.

The passage is reminiscent of a killer line in a song called "Immigration is the Sincerest form of Battery" by the band Every Time I Die: "It is better to destroy than to create what is meaningless."



Williams warns us to destroy all sub-standard work - erase it while you can still control it - before it does any damage. The song makes a similar point.

The song itself, I think, is a reference to a great film called 8 1/2 by Federico Fellini. The film is about a young director struggling to make a film that never gets made. It's basically a film about a film that can't be filmed. Guido, the filmmaker says: "It's better to destroy than create what's unnecessary."

Paterson came first, in 1958. 8 1/2 was made in 1963, and the song was recorded in the 2000s.

It's heady stuff:
The artist as perfectionist / struggling with lack of control
Bad ideas as dangerous / poisonous
The responsibilities of creators
Creator's shame of juvenilia

William Carlos Williams on Nothingness

Book 2, part 3 begins with this short poem:


Look for the nul
defeats it all

the N of all
equations

that rock, the blank
that holds them up

which pulled away -
the rock's

their fall. Look
for that nul

that's past all
seeing

the death of all
that's past

all being.



Try reading it this way:

Look / for that nul / that's past all / seeing
The death of all / that's past / all being


The "nul" (Null = nothingness) is the "Blank that holds them up" The null "which pulled away (causes) the rock's their fall" The Null underlies and holds up everything. Nothingness is the foundation of being. The fact that there is anything is dependent on the fact that there could be nothing.

Look for it!

The Structure of Paterson (so far)

I'm just starting to get into Paterson now, but I'm picking up on the pattern. Williams is braiding 3 or 4 separate story lines together so that they all interrupt each other. We have a straightforward historical narrative, items from local newspapers, a meandering free verse poem that follows his walking around town, and mixed up scraps of correspondence.

The river and the falls feature prominently in the book with lots of references to water:

with the roar of the river / forever in our ears ...
challenging our waking

the pouring waters of their hair ...
the gathered spray

Perfect Ben

If anyone asks me what kind of writer Ben Marcus is, I will use this single quote from "Against Attachment", part of chapter 5 in "Leaving the Sea" to explain.

"Graves were called homes, and apologies known as writing were carved in their surface. Rotten bags were called people."

Maybe one more, from "First Love."

"The shovels we use to cleave the air in two - and possibly reveal a person we might fail against - were once abbreviated as hands. [...] When we faced off with a person, the sound of our four shovels colliding produced a shield of silent, wind-free air known as home. This was when there were only two choices how to behave, on or off. We would apparently put some objects into our mistake tunnel, which was still the main opening in the face, and the tunnel was able to convulse around them and propel them deep into the body's grave, which was then called, I think, a belly."

The Meaning of Leaving the Sea

I am sitting down to read "Leaving the Sea" -- the short piece of writing for which this book is titled. It is basically a six-page sentence. Today is Tuesday, Feb. 18th. It's 11am. It's starting to snow and I could use another cup of coffee. The commute tonight promises to be several hours.

11:06am - Halfway done.

11:14am - OK, that was great.

"...before our house started leaning, started hissing when the wind came up after sunset, a house no different from a gut-shot animal listing into the woods, a woods no different from a spray of wire bursting through the earth, an earth no different from a leaking sack of water, soft in the middle and made of mush..."

Leaving the Sea (the title of the book, and this story specifically) is (I think) about a loss of innocence and a step into constant struggle.

"...so that they could jump on me and ride on me and kick into the place where I would have gills if I were something better that had never tried to leave the sea..."

The sea is our ultimate home. When we left the sea to walk the earth we chose endless struggle over endless gliding and beauty. Oh well.

Brittle

BRITTLE
What makes a person brittle? Pain can make you brittle, being like glass or clay, being dropped too many times, being fired at too high a heat, being thrust into the cold, being forced -- all these but also this: an insistence on beauty can make a person brittle.


BRITTLE
And all that pushing away of the unbeautiful will make you brittle.





Sea of Hooks
pg. 59

Paranoia vs. Removal-of-blinders

Mason & Dixon are on an island in the southern latitudes to observe the transit of venus. They climb the hills to the island's interior and look out at the sea, remarking that the water appears higher than the land, as if poised to swallow the island. Our narrator says:

"For anyone deluded enough to remain down at sea level, there must come a moment when he finds himself looking upward at the Crests approaching."

This sentence is not about waves. It's classic Pynchon telling us dummies to get our heads out of the sand and look around. To question everything. To see the hidden power structure behind the seemingly random events of the world. And then to see even deeper to the hidden power behind the power. And on and on.


"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

Look up and see the coming waves before it's too late!

Trust no one!

Open your eyes, sheeple.

Etc, etc.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Beckett's characters, including Molloy and Moran, seem to be filled with a longing to stop. They want to rest, sit, lie down. They want to die, or at least to live without movement or emotion.

"Beckett Sitting"

Moran has his grave prepared:

"As long as the earth endures that spot is mine, in theory. Sometimes I went and looked at my grave. The stone was up already. It was a simple Latin cross, white. I wanted to have my name put on it with the here lies and the date of my birth. Then all it would have wanted is the date of my death. They would not let me. Sometimes I smiled as if I were dead already."

To sum up: Life is grim and it makes you unbearably tired.

"You must choose between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so."